Biden carries with him “cheat sheets” that provide advance knowledge of a reporter’s question, whom to call upon, etc.

One hilarious example shows Biden needs guidance for even the most basic of tasks.

“YOU enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants,” the note read, then immediately directed the oldest-ever president, “YOU take YOUR seat.”

Just like his last campaign the whole presidency is a complete sham. The man is not under control.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/26/biden-cheat-sheet-shows-he-had-advance-knowledge-of-journalists-question/amp/

If citizens do not choose to support the state, but only do so out of coercion, it is on shakey ground. And certainly, with the advent of Trump, I would say that the Republican party has embraced a new vision of freedom that is defined overwhelmingly as negative freedom, i.e., freedom from constraint, particularly government constraint. This view of freedom is, at its core, philosophically anathema to a successful state, though thankfully not all traces of a consideration of reflexive or social freedom has been purged from the GOP, just the "Trumpist" component.

It’s true, I believe. On the whole of it, the liberal tradition of negative freedom has hardly made any inroads into the public domain until relatively recently.

Rather, it was the republican tradition of freedom as a mix of the rule of law and the independence from arbitrary will that has always been the core of it, from Madison and Jefferson and Adams on downward. This view makes the state central to the achievement of individual freedom, perhaps ironically.

It doesn’t help that most of the tenets were pure wind. Class consciousness, class struggle, historicism, dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering of the state, the labor theory of value…all of it was snake oil sold to a weary public, who mostly had little choice in the matter anyways. Had Marx argued the phrase “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” as a normative principle rather than some teleological end-game, we might be well into communist living right now. But the normative principles were revolution and violence, leading to murder and theft and oppression on a mass scale.

Communism was a kind of ideological colonialism that has lad some countries, like China or Russia, to sever its own history and adopt a European myth in its place. If it had tried to be normative rather than scientific, had led by example rather than violence, it might have become a sort of religion, like the Amish, where it’s adherents are looked upon fondly as they go around working together and sharing the fruits of their labor.

For me it goes to “sourcehood”. Basically, the source of the action is that which willed it, decided it, governed it, chose it etc. Until anyone can show that an action is not self-generated, but begins at some other place and time, so-called libertarian free will is the only good answer to the question of free will.

A bunch of lawyers and politicians may be of secret societies, but no society I’m a part of. Truth is you and I do not make any laws, and since we are a part of society, society does not make laws.

So? It is not in our nature to agree on everything. That’s why I afford them the right to disagree.

Where do these 'natural rights' of human beings come from? What is 'justice'? In nature, the best adapted genetic material survives in offspring; some organisms find mutual protection in societies and evolve social orders. I do not believe 'justice' exists as anything but a social concept elaborated by humans. How else can it exist? As soon as a concept is defined in human terms, it ceases to be natural. Yet how can undefined concepts be secured?

They come from men. The idea is that given the evidence human nature provides, such is enough for a reasonable man to conclude what rights ought to be conferred on him. One needn’t examine a law to discover that man ought to have a right to life, for example. He can do that by considering his own nature and that of others.

As for justice, I’m not sure what it is, but I do know what it isn’t. Justice is the absence of injustice, which is discoverable wherever it is found and with the same evidence and reasoning. One doesn’t need a law or declaration of human rights to conclude that it is wrong to punish someone for something they didn’t do, for example. Children recognize unfairness at a very young age. And so on.

One of the oddest trends in the history of politics is the idea that man must create an institution which then confers rights and privileges upon man. I think it’s clear that those who have rejected the divine right of kings in name have adopted it in practice, affording the same sovereignty as the king to the government, allowing it any number of positive interventions in the lives and affairs of others as if it wasn’t run by men. It’s no wonder that beneath its self-aggrandizement the government is simply a mechanism for taking money from one person’s pockets and putting it in another.

In rejection of this, the state should be concerned with securing the natural rights of human beings and making justice accessible. Beyond that it should not go.

But one cannot say that the government should disappear. Where man has evolved for millennia to depend on himself and his fellows, he is now waist deep in the process of domestication, whereby he is trained to respond favorably to the government, even in its most evil capacities. By now people have become so dependant on the state, that there is a class of primates who were never weaned and are unprepared to live without the zookeepers embrace. I don’t think there is any turning back.

Though businessman is highly represented in the former occupations of reps and senators, so are lawyers, veterans, and professional politicians. So it isn’t quite the party of business that Chomsky claims.

https://www.brookings.edu/multi-chapter-report/vital-statistics-on-congress/amp/#datatables

It’s a two-party system, the Ins and the Outs. Those who are in and want to stay in; those who are out but want to get in. Bipartisanship is the problem.

It’s tax relief. The tax relief you get depends on the rate of tax you pay. You’re using money that is already taxed. If you do not earn enough money to pay tax, you probably won’t get tax relief on your donation.

I missed it. After having read it, it doesn’t appear that you’re avoiding or evading taxes at all. Availing oneself of the tax system is not the same as avoiding taxes in my eyes.

I favor the rule of the people; you favor the rule of a few. I favor democracy; you favor representative government. I favor sovereign persons; you favor the idea that people get to exercise their sovereignty at the ballot box one day every few years. Ironically, I am a democrat, you’re a republican.

Report a person or business you think is not paying enough tax or is committing another type of fraud against HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

This includes:

• running a business without telling HMRC
  
• not paying enough Income Tax or National Insurance
  
• making false claims for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme
  
• making false claims for Child Benefit or Tax Credits
  
• not being registered for VAT when they should be
  
• not charging VAT or other taxes on goods or services they sell
  
• not paying VAT or other taxes on goods or services they buy
  
• hiding money, shares or other assets in an offshore bank account
  
• other types of tax avoidance or tax evasion
  

https://www.gov.uk/report-tax-fraud

According to the government, your words alone might make any scrupulous tax man report you to the authorities, submitting you to investigation, which is itself a punishment. I think you’re right to avoid taxes as much as possible, and am confident it is all above board, but I’d be careful because the government is forever set on closing the tax gap.

A system whereby your neighbor can report you to the authorities for avoiding taxes is just another layer of threat among the rest of them. That you are arbitrarily subject to their whims is unavoidable. What you do today may be a crime tomorrow.

But, but but,... is not tax only possible if there is private property? And therefore a feature of non-communist regimes?

Taxes are necessary for any regime that cannot generate its own revenue. The exploitation of both the labor and finances and the property of its citizens is inherent in a communist regime, but not exclusive to it.

Tax evasion and tax fraud aren’t crimes in the UK?

You also disclosed that you profit from tax collection insofar as you draw from the government’s finances.

The problem with the argument @Tzeentch and @NOS4A2 are putting forward (as I believe we've discussed before) is that property rights are not intrinsically connected to violence.

The government could, quite easily, simply take what it believes is its property without any violence at all. I could just remove the money from you bank account. It could rock up to your house whilst you're out, break in, and take your stuff. Or, it could do so whilst you're in (since the same proscription applies to you - you can't use violence against them to make the stop).

It sounds like you can base it on non-violence, but it still revolves around property rights, when it comes to taxes.

States have certainly streamlined the activity of taking people’s money to the point where violence isn’t necessary. But tax evasion and tax fraud is still punishable by law and carries with it a range of life-altering penalties, from fines to prison sentences.

So though people may have been convinced that paying taxes is some sort sacrificial duty to a higher power, at bottom the threat of being kidnapped and imprisoned against one’s will still remains.

With the monopoly on violence comes the monopoly on crime. If any one, or any group, were to engage in any of the activities of government, including collecting taxes, they’d be imprisoned as criminals. Does that not say anything about the nature of their behavior?

Somehow and at some point people were convinced that voting was tantamount to democracy, that marking a piece of paper every few years constitutes the rule of the people. This is not any kind of rule of the people that I can employ in any seriousness, so I refuse to believe that since a man was nominally voted into power he has any legitimate authority over other people.

By bureaucracy I mean the state machinery and its employees, dependant as they are through the appropriation of other people’s labor and money. And we can agree that the appointment of these people will not make everyone happy.

There is a difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate authority. One's status as an official, or employment within a bureaucracy, is not good enough to justify the legitimacy of their own authority. It is for this reason that their job is thankless.

Society should be vigilant but delegating that vigilance to some job-holding bureaucrat, subject to the whims of a political class, is to be the opposite of vigilant.

All state systems are capitalist, the socialist ones included. I don't think the existence of one precludes the existence of others because any state that does not consider the production and management of capital is unimaginable. I avoid using that term as mucn as possible because it was a term of abuse invented by socialists and in its common use is essentially incoherent. But the increasing interventions into the social affairs of human beings proves to me that the state has a "social" rather than a "liberal" or "individualistic" tendency, and therefor socialism is the reigning ideology.

The state has never manifested as the liberal night-watchman, as far as I know, preferring to exploit and monopolize rather than protect. Instead, it increasingly expands its scope and power until finally it intervenes in all human activity. Communists promised us the state would just wither away but it became more and more totalitarian under their rule, as it invariably does. The teleology of each state is to capture society until both society and the state are indistinguishable. Notice how some can't help but conflate society and government as if they were one and the same.

One can search the entire website for the phrase “abolish the state” and find out that Mikie is the only one who ever drones on about it, hilariously enough.

So he made a choice: comply with the laws of one country - at least until he can use the legislative process to change them, move to another country, or stop doing business.
You have the same choice.

And people have the choice not to exploit their fellow man. Stop taking another’s stuff. Quit forcing another to labor for you. Find other means to satisfy your wants that do not involve exploiting others.

If you want to delegate your responsibilities to your fellow human beings to someone else, go for it. But I don’t think that favoring a piece of legislation—in other words sitting around and doing nothing—is any sign that you’re helping anyone but yourself. Until I see you out there feeding people or giving them housing, your sanctimony falls on deaf ears.

I am not in favor of stealing people’s money so Mikie can say he favors legislation, no.

Yeah, so I guess babies, the disabled, children, the elderly, etc., better get off their asses.

Until I see you feeding any of those people I will never deny them any means to acquire food. You would.

Do you think food just falls in someone’s mouth? All food is acquired with work, buddy.

Yea, if someone wants to be a slave, learns to be under the dominion of a master, and have his money taken from him without his permission, like you want, I say go for it.

If you want to call voluntary activity between consenting parties “slavery”, be my guest.

The employer is forced to deduct a specific amount or else he is breaking the law.

Then why do you?

I don’t.

The principle is that I rail against the involuntary activity between non-consenting parties, not the voluntary activity between consenting parties. Your principle seems to be the opposite.

Which happens to an extreme degree in corporate America, the “private sector.” Oddly, we never hear you railing against that. It always works out somehow that this kind of exploitation is perfectly justified.

Why would I rail against the voluntary activity between consenting adults?

An observation regarding taxes...

The places I call home have what some would call fairly high taxes. Yet, I know a few ordinary families with, say, more than one car. Societies with public transportation and self-made rich folks. And reasonable general standard of living.

Such like suggests (to me at least) that anti-taxers go by (dogmatic) ideology, but I could surely be wrong.

Personally I don’t care if your tax money built me a home made of gold and furnished me with every luxury I could imagine. It’s wrong to take fruits of someone’s labor and use it to benefit others, just as it was wrong to do it to exploit the fruits of the slave’s labor, and for the same reasons. So I wouldn’t oppose it because I was told to, or because it furthers my lot in life, but because it is wrong to behave that way towards others.

But compare your tax burden with the tax burden in the UAE or the Cayman Islands or Monaco.

No. That melodramatic representation of taxes is both inaccurate and unacceptable. People's things aren't taken; only a predetermined and agreed-upon portion of the money which was issued and guaranteed by a government agency, and which they receive in return for some function they perform that is of value to somebody who is in possession of those funds.

Yes they are taken. You agree to a wage with an employer; the government takes a portion of your income. Neither you nor your employer determine how much is taken. This occurs involuntarily, whether you agree with it or not.

It’s either/or, collectivism or individualism. There is no middle ground.

I’m not saying you’re guilty of anything, either. I’m just showing you’re not writing anything new or nuanced, that you are making the same arguments that they have, and in so doing have revealed which side of the fence you have taken. The fact that that side of the fence is a veritable rogue’s gallery of evil, tyranny, and mass murder is not my fault. You’ve blamed individualism for the same things they have. You hold the same ideas.

Your description of the parts of individualism you like as “humanism” reveals only how badly you wish to avoid being associated with the label “individualism”. It does not indicate which political unit you believe exists, let alone which political unit you think ought to have rights or ought to be paramount in its relation to power and the state.

One of the greatest conceits is that only man in his government form can lay asphalt, deliver packages, pick up garbage, or care for the sick. Here in the great white north we have abandoned state-controlled air traffic control, one of the first countries to do so. It's one less thing I am forced to pay for even when I don't use it.

I can appreciate that. It was a loaded question, anyways.

Are you for or against appropriating the fruits of someone’s labor?

I can show any number of quotes from socialists, fascists, conservatives, communists, throughout the ages about the atomization theory of individualism, and the resulting fear of selfishness, hermitic lifestyle, and the anarchy that is supposed to result because of it. But again all of it rests on a false anthropology.

All of it was designed in service to the power of tradition, religion, the monarchy, the state, all of which imply subordination and obedience. So I do not care about your nuance when I can see what it is designed to protect: the sanctity and prestige of one or more collectivist and anti-social institutions. Collapse of what? The state? The church? The monarchy? No doubt it’s some amorphous institution set over and above the value of human beings qua human beings.

Conflating selfishness and individualism is a collectivist canard as old as the word itself, and flips the dictum that man is a social animal on its head. I can’t take anyone who repeats it that seriously because it posits a glaringly false anthropology, that man is a fundamentally anti-social animal—as soon as individuals were set free from the bonds of subordination and are afforded rights they’d become hermits and care only for themselves.

It was the conservatives and royalists who invented the term and the communists, socialists, and fascists that keep using it with this meaning today. Consequently it was collectivists who historically stood in opposition to freedom, human rights, individual worth, and human dignity. Apparently this meaning persists on philosophy forums.

That's what I said, both are extremes that eventually lead to collapse. And we've also seen somewhat of a pure individualistic society through the neoliberalism movement in the 80s. Most of the Millennial generation has been formed as individualists and many of the problems today are the result of individualism, even though we've not seen a nation embracing it fully, since that would almost be anarchistic.

It cannot be said that any of the problems of today are the result of individualism. Greed, egotism, self-concern, which are often associated with individualism, are all of them perennial problems, not limited to any specific political epoch, and found in collectivists as much as in individualists.

There is no individualism. There has never been any individualism. Everywhere we look the individual is subordinate to a collective state, bound to act in compulsory cooperation with people that are not his brethren or friend, and under rules that are not his own.

This is inherently built into the Westphalian system of international relations, which is essentially anarchistic. Look at which being in the world is considered sovereign. Look at which being in the world is afforded life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the dominion and jurisdiction over all lands, all behaviors, all interactions, that occur within the bounds of its property. Far from a liberal individualism, we have adopted the individualism of Carlyle, "the vital articulation of many individuals into a new collective individual". We have adopted collectivism.

The individual has no rights, but only the rights the state provisionally grants him; the state may suspend them, modify them, or take them away at its own pleasure. It's how a nominally liberal democracy can get away with subjugating its entire population, as they did during the most recent pandemic. That's why the notion of a res publica, a government for the people by the people, is the greatest stroke of propaganda ever written. It has convinced people that their master is themselves. They now believe the conditional life of a conscript, a serf, a slave, is freedom, and an absolutist oligarchy is democracy. They believe that since they get to exercise their sovereignty on an astronomical basis (according to how many times the earth revolves around the sun), every few years voting for which mammal gets to dominate them, that they too are in control.

I suspect that this condition more so than individualism has led to the problems of today.